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Remember Newt Gingrich and his plan to bring $2.50 per gallon gasoline to drivers across America last winter during the GOP primary season?

Back then, gas prices were about to hit $4 a gallon in many parts of the country, and Team Obama was beginning to panic at the prospect of $5-a-gallon gas this summer.

Well, what a difference six months makes. Today, crude prices are firmly mired in a bear market, gasoline is averaging $3.47 a gallon, and some experts are predicting $3 gas by this fall.

If the trend continues, President Obama could deliver $2.50 gasoline to voters by Election Day, while taking nary a regulatory step toward the US energy independence that Gingrich proposed.

On the face of it, the plunge in gas and other commodity prices should be a very welcome election-year gift to the White House. But not so fast.

Quite to the contrary, some key market-watchers have started to warn that the precipitous plunge in commodity prices since March is an ominous sign for the global economy.

As David Zervos, the market maven at Jeffries, contends, the message of the markets is clear: Central banks from Washington to Beijing are not printing enough money to pull the world out of its deflationary spiral.

No wonder stock investors ran for the exits on Thursday after Fed chief Ben Bernanke took down his 2012 forecasts for growth and employment, but failed to pull the trigger on a new round of easy money. As the folks at Zero Hedge note, “A large sustained drop in energy costs at this stage of the reflationary game is VERY unsettling.”

So keep an eye on oil prices and other commodities.

The fact that a basket of two dozen key commodities has plunged 22 percent over the past four months should give the Fed more than enough cover to print, print, print.

With one eye on the markets and the other on the calendar, it’s likely Helicopter Ben will take flight in the next few weeks.